Grow Big Always

If you’re a regular listener to this podcast you’ve probably heard me bash capitalism a lot. The reality is there’s no escaping it, it’s taken over nearly every corner of the world. That certainly hasn’t stopped me from wincing whenever I travel to a far-away lands and am met with local trinket shops and people peddling their wares. But who am I to judge whether this is good or bad for a society. Oftentimes these are poor, macho communities with substantial pressures on them. They see the money come in and out of their world without them able to touch it. Often these countries also have remote destinations that house incredible archeological sites, but have a community that remains poor and helpless to take advantage of its history. And then there’s the question: should they? And if they do, what would that do to their culture? Would it be a positive or negative thing to suddenly take capitalism and mix it with something like archeology? Well, I learned a lot about that from this week’s guest, Larry Coben. He started his career as a Venture Capitalist focused on energy companies until he decided to make a huge career change and pursue Archeology. He’s since figured out away through his non-profit, The Sustainable Preservation Initiative, to combine both his backgrounds. He’s incredibly focused on preserving the world’s cultural heritage through sustainable economic opportunities for poor communities where a lot of women and cultures are struggling. How he has decided to approach this— to empower these poor communities all over Central America— is truly thought provoking, a bit controversial and, in the end, an incredibly cool solution for how to bridge the past with the present. Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/larry-coben

Food is #1. If you’re an American, there’s no dodging it— from turning on the tv and seeing that juicy hamburger, to reading article after article about how to lose weight, to gym memberships, to following crazy diets or eating philosophies, or hell just look at the most popular things on the internet. It's food and there’s a million points of view on it. In fact, if you haven’t had a conversation with a friend about how your pants are fitting or whose fat and how they look— you’re probably not living in our society.  I wanted to take a step out of that whole crazy zoo and look at things from more of an objective “zookeeper’s” perspective when it comes to what we eat, why we’re compelled to eat it, and what we can do if we want to outsmart our brains in this insane, food-focused environment. I wanted to learn how our brain is naturally wired, how we ate for millions of years, how our eating patterns might be different from the rest of the world, why we crave the things we do, and why there’s so much tension about all this in our day-to-day societies. Ultimately, can we do anything about it?   To do that I reached out to Neurobiologist, Dr. Stephan Guyenet. He wrote a book on this very thing called, “The Hungry Brain.” It’s freaking awesome and frames things exactly in the way I was looking for. It helps you understand why we’re eating the way we are and what we can do, specifically, to get around all this and not fall trap to the marketplaces vying for our money or shove those greasy pork rinds in our mouth. In this episode, you’ll take away those specific things you can do and hopefully dodge those extremely unhealthy bullets.  Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/stephen-guyenet

If you’re reading this and are middle aged (especially a man) you’re depressed and don’t have any friends. That’s right, I’m talking to you and so are big industries who capitalize on your sad state like pharma, shrinks, and the tornado of advertisers who prey on your pleas for help.  Us middle-aged people are crying out for help, just like our babies who we put in nursery rooms by themselves. By now, our kids have left, our marriage may have left, and all the friends we used to have are on their own little islands, suffering just like us. We’ve all over-declared our independence, our society has built a super complex, reinforcing system around it.  I’m one of these poor souls, too: a middle aged guy with my wife as my best friend, whose put everything I have into my family and most of those kids are now adults who have moved on and left poor, old me feeling really isolated and lonely.  To learn more about that, I reached out to Harvard’s Jacqueline Olds, author (along with her husband) of The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-first Century. In our Skype conversation we talk about not only how our society got here, but what we can do about it and where we might be headed. So, if you’re looking to course correct and get yourself out of Funkville, take a listen to Professor Olds and hopefully you find yourself no longer alone in the room, listening to the Titanic soundtrack.   Music credit: Celine Dion, My Heart Will Go On Image credit: Lyst

It’s always interesting to me to see which drugs get thrown under the bus. Most of them are the ones that are illegal but the reality is, as you’ve heard on this show, that drugs are used for all kinds of reasons. Some of which are “pharmaceutical” and have to do with capitalistic interest and some are “recreational” and have to do with spiritual or social interest. The use of all those drugs has everything to do with the intent of the person or company behind it. That’s why I wanted an episode dedicated to GHB, often labeled the date-rape drug. As you’ll hear, there have been many date-rape drugs. GHB has some amazing benefits to it that has nothing to do with it’s date-rape branding. I wasn’t sure, at first, who to reach out to to have this conversation and then I remembered Dan Pardi, a personal friend and one of the smartest people I know. His work is focused on health from very different but interconnected points-of-view, given his research background in the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences department at Stanford as well as the Departments of Neurology and Endocrinology at Leiden University in the Netherlands (where he investigates how lifestyle factors, like sleep, influence decision making, cognitive performance, and metabolism) he’s the perfect person to lean into this topic. He’s done a number of studies on diet and all dimensions of health that don’t fall into your typical buckets. I love the way he brings those things together in a lot less industry-specific ways. He’s had to dig into things like GHB as he’s looked into the research informing everything from elite fighters in the Naval Special Warfare divisions, to aging, sleep, and overall health performance. It’s this holistic perspective that I thought would be really cool to bring to the conversation and really identify just how hard it is to pull these things into separated, illuminated little buckets and try to analyze them as if they stand alone in the world. I hope this episode on GHB demystifies some of it for you and opens your brain to all the different kinds of applications that this drug could have. If anythig else, you’ll definitely think about GHB differently. Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/dan-pardi

There’s an incredible separation between the stuff we consume— like food or products— and the people who are making that stuff for us. Certainly in the States we walk through stores and everything is plastic wrapped— none of us can imagine that all the pieces came from an animal let alone the work environment that people who created the product for us had to endure. Our products are created for us in the same way— we have no idea how they’re made or how it’s affecting other people’s lives on the other side of that chain. The reality is there’s huge industries obsessed with obfuscating the scary truth because when you strip it back, people are having incredible life-threatening situations and we have no idea. The reason we have no idea is because there’s effort made to constantly pivot or rename bad things so that we think the products that we’re buying are “green” or otherwise humanely created. This isn’t about being a tree-hugger, there’s just some basic human rights that people should have that make things for us. Certainly, their lives shouldn’t be destroyed making products for us. It might not be the sexiest topic to stop and think about, but this week’s guest, Dr. Paul Blanc, is fighting the good fight. He’s a professor of medicine at University of California San Francisco and has a background in Pulmonology and has written a couple of amazing books. The most recent one, Fake Silk: The lethal history of Viscose Rayon and the preceding, How Everyday Products Make People Sick, both shine a light on the other side of the what-we’re-purchasing equation that really needs it. I know you’ll like our conversation and at least stay away from things like skinless weenies.

We crave belonging. As crazy-distracting and divisive as the world is, it’s easy to forget the simple fact that deep down we want to be accepted and feel part of a tribe. Given how the world has developed, for most of us, this is very hard. I had an amazing opportunity to dig into what it takes to connect to very different groups by talking to someone who has done extreme versions of this. Bruce Parry has travelled to some of the most remote places on planet Earth and inserted himself into wildly foreign cultures and people. For some of these tribes, meeting him was “first contact” of any outsider. Imagine making connection with groups of people where you don’t speak their language, look wildly different, don’t eat their food or wear their clothes. How would you do it? What could you learn about yourself by making those connections? Especially after doing it 20-30 times? Bruce Parry is an award-winning documentarian, author and a famous BBC host of such documentary shows as Tribe, Amazon and Arctic. He has travelled to extreme environments spending significant time with indigenous people. While these people have very different rituals, such as cannibalism or smoking ayahuasca, Bruce has been welcomed as a member and has had the chance to connect and understand people at a human level that most of us never get the opportunity to encounter. So, at a time when separation has never been more forced upon us, knowing what it takes to belong are a set of keys we can all use everyday. This is a special chance to hear someone who has developed an amazing ability to connect and belong at every level and in every corner of life. Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/bruce-parry

When you live in the Bay Area you pass tons of folks who appear to be mad. Most of us don’t spend enough time focusing on how our culture handles folks on the spectrum of some level of mental illness. When you think about it— the range of “madness” ranges from people with very serious mental illness to people who don’t socially fit in. As you look back across history, you can see just how we’ve dealt with it, who we’ve blamed for it, and what crazy treatments we’ve put in place. Who better to talk about that than someone who studies it for a living. Andrew Scull, this week’s guest, is exactly that person. As a professor of Sociology at the University of San Diego, he’s written a ton of books on this subject over decades.  We talked about his most recent one, “Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity from the Bible to Freud” when he stopped by for this week’s recording among his other works. And it’s a refreshing perspective on exactly how we’ve looked at madness and and maybe how we might look at it in the future.

Clearly throughout recorded history we’ve been fascinated by things like the Fountain of Youth and anything that would reverse the aging process. Let’s face it, if you’re over 40, you feel it physically. Your systems just start to break down. In modern medicine, this process has been seen as disease but this week’s guest, Aubrey de Grey, sees it more like an engineering challenge. Aubrey is a very controversial biomedical gerontologist and crusader against aging. He has a very specific plan that identifies the various components that cause human tissue to age, and he has very specific remedies for each of them. That’s what his non-profit, The SENS Research Foundation (a 501C-3) focuses on and it’s got some interesting people behind it, like Peter Thiel (one of the founders of PayPal) and Aubrey himself who has invested a large part of his inheritance to the cause.  Grow Big Always often has conversations with rebels that help us reshape the points of view that we take for granted, so Aubrey de Gray is a perfect guest. I hope you enjoy this conversation we had via Skype. Maybe you’ll end up agreeing with him— that the person that ends up living to 1,000 years old has already been born today.

Way outside our cities and towns are societies of disappearing and endangered indigenous people . Some of us may think that’s natural— it’s been happening forever. Others fight to protect those cultures and have very strong opinions about what’s right and what’s wrong for those people. One of those opinions is whether there’s a “right way” to depict people who are different than us— who are not living in urbanized or Western societies. I was surprised by just how controversial this subject really was. I guess it’s ok that we’re surrounded by spectacular images that romanticize cars, sports, and marriage. Really anything commercial— but to apply a similar heroic lens to people who are different than us, well, that could be sacrilege. It seems there are people out there who believe that the only way to photograph those folks needs to be as an anthropological documentarian— capturing people only how they’re actually living vs in their Sunday best— proud, celebrated, glamorized. I mean, isn’t that what we do when we take pictures of ourselves? We're not posting pictures of ourselves hanging in sweatpants and stuffing our face with Fritos. It’s ok that we’re beautiful but god forbid that we make that commentary about those poor, exotic people living on the edge of the world. There are no edges to this world. There are people who live far away from our dense, standardized populations but our cultures are the edge from their point of view. This week it was my pleasure to talk to photographer Jimmy Nelson from his place in Amsterdam on his way out to another remote destination. Jimmy has been a photographer for over 30 years and his book “Before they Pass Away,” showcases 35 disappearing tribal cultural around the world. He captures them with stunning images. They’re truly incredible portraits of vanishing people. Be sure to visit growbigalways.com to check out a portfolio of his images as well as a video that will give you an up close look at what it’s like traveling and capturing remote and spectacularly loving societies. As Jimmy puts it, photographing these people are as much about discovering them as it is about discovering himself and how he belongs in the world. Really isn’t that what we’re all trying to do? We’re all on that same journey. I hope you enjoy listening to Jimmy’s and it inspires you to engage in his important work, which I guarantee will have a huge impact on you.

If you’re like me you might ask, where has imagination gone? We seem to have forgotten that muscle. How to even tap what’s really inside us. It’s sort of amazing when you think about it, we’re born into a world where there are tuning forks on any topic that pump out a story about what that topic should be— how we should think, feel, and behave when it comes to marriage, love, money, work, religion— or really any topic. So we find ourselves trying to adjust our harmony to those other tuning forks. We’re reacting to them. We’re trying to make them happy. We’re trying to satisfy all of the demands that those containers and shapes are asking us to conform to. It’s almost impossible to get in tune with reality. There’s a lot of guests on this show that have talked about how fake everything we’ve created really is and certainly that is true when it comes to one of the most fundamental topics: our sexuality. How we encounter and express intimacy— physically, emotionally, spiritually, and cosmically— with someone else. How we share it and what it should look like. When you look around at other people’s definitions, we see porn, we see sex in advertising and movies. Things other people are tell us are erotic. We feel what’s supposed to be ok or not ok and it’s all categorized for us on Pornhub. It’s spelled out in our religion or culture. Everything is there for us to follow what other people have imagined for us. Well one of the most powerful things that you can do as someone who wants to break out of that mould, it to put those things at bay and put your energy into finding the original harmony inside of you. To find a way to give it voice. That’s what this week’s guest, Alphachanneling, does with art. Each image that’s conjures is a sort of poem, prayer or meditation on a cosmic part of the way we connect with each other and with ourselves. Clearly the work has caught on, Alphachanneling has almost 500,000 followers on Instagram, has been featured in magazines like Juxtapoz, reviewed by top art critics, and had a solo show. Alphachanneling was nice enough to come over to my house to sit and chat. Which we did. You’ll hear some of that, though we actually chatted about as long after the recording. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Alphachanneling and it wakes up some cosmic expression inside you. That you find new ways to relate to your own body, to your own magic and incredibly psychedelic opportunity to reach intimacy in completely new ways.